LG to Release 40-inch OLED TV in 2012

By
Dan Hope Oct 30th, 2009

OLED TVs haven’t proved to be very promising for consumers, despite being billed as the next big thing in HDTVs. Currently, Sony sells an OLED TV but it’s only 11 inches, and most manufacturers don’t have plans to build anything bigger than 20 inches in the near future. However, LG obviously feels more optimistic about consumer-grade OLED TVs.

The company has announced we can expect 40-inch OLED TVs as soon as 2012. Given what we’ve heard about the progression of OLED technology, this is a big improvement over the old timeline. OLED TVs have been far too expensive to compete with LCD or plasma in larger sizes, but the manufacturing process is making great strides toward mitigating the cost.

The prediction comes as part of LG’s OLED roadmap, announced at the FPD International 2009 conference, which outlines when we can plan to see OLED TVs from the company. The current plan is to gradually increase the size until 40-inch screens become commercially viable in 2012. There’s already a 15-inch model in production that will be available in November. Then LG will release 20-inch and 30-inch OLED TVs in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Then we’ll see the big stuff the following year.

LG says the 40-inch will still be “fairly expensive” compared to similar sized TVs using other technology, but they expect OLED TV materials to be cheaper than that of LCD TVs by 2016. If that prediction comes true, OLED could be selling for less than LCD in just a few years. At that point LCD TV sales would probably drop dramatically as OLED already provides a better image and uses less power. If it’s also cheaper, there’s no reason to choose LCD over OLED.